'I've posted everything from Michelin three-star haute cuisine in the Black Forest to a packet of Wotsits on Southeastern trains.' Illustration: Ben Lamb for the Guardian

Marina O'Loughlin: 'I'm an Instagram bore'

I was out for lunch with a senior industry figure, a man loved and revered in the food biz. As the food started arriving, I whipped out my phone and began to position the dishes in the best light, at the best angles for snapping. To my astonishment, the usually charming, softly spoken chap exploded: "Put that fucking thing away! I simply cannot stand it!"

Yes, I'm one of those most derided of internet denizens, the food Instagrammer. Recently, Time Out published a cartoon of us: we are scrawny, earnest, our clothes so fashionable we look like Edwardian urchins, with designer glasses and bushy beards. There's nothing so easily lampoonable. The general subtext is: who on earth is interested in seeing pictures of your dinner, you silly, shallow sod? But the answer to that is simple: other food Instagrammers, of course.

The idea that you might want to show people you don't know photographs of your breakfast would once have been risible. To click your camera, remove the spool, take it to Boots and wait for the shiny card things to display proudly to anyone who stood still long enough – how bonkers. But one of the joys of the internet is that there's no pursuit so niche that you can't find willing participants.

I've posted everything from Michelin three-star haute cuisine in the Black Forest to a packet of Wotsits on Southeastern trains. I've been known to avoid something delicious (cassoulet in Toulouse, for instance) in favour of something not quite so alluring (raw calves' brains), because that's what will get most "likes" for my bravery. And then when my phone died before I got a chance to capture les cervelles, I had the most unattractive, Veruca Salt meltdown. I can sulk equally unattractively if the "likes" don't come. I hate myself for it, but if it doesn't pass the magic number of 11, at which point the "likers" are no longer listed by name, I'm as bad as any teenage girl. If I get an acknowledgment from one of the stars of the weirdo food-Instagrammer firmament, I'm as giddy as a kipper. (I recently batted off a tantrum from my daughter with the immortal words: "Not now, sweetie – I'm speaking to René Redzepi on Twitter.")

In my defence, I am not the worst of the breed. I have eaten in restaurants where diners have set up tripods for their SLRs; or made everyone stop eating while they ferried the dishes to the window for "better light". Perhaps this is why mine are so cr… er, amateurish.

I finally managed to calm my food guru chum via the application of a great deal of burgundy, but I know he thinks less of me because I take pictures of my lunch for strangers. I guess I'll just have to live with that.

Stuart Heritage: 'I outsourced my life'

'For a tenner a month, plus an hourly fee, GetFriday promised that a virtual personal assistant would carry out all manner of tasks, from organising my calendar to tracking down my lost pets.' Illustration: Ben Lamb for the Guardian

The internet is full of services desperate to do your chores. Sign up to TaskRabbit and someone will assemble furniture for you. On Jinn, people will buy and deliver food or shopping for you. Meanwhile on PeoplePerHour, there's a guy promising to prepare your business accounts for £25. He's dressed as Batman, though, which might not bode well. But if you're a relentless workaholic and your time is too valuable to indulge in mindless busywork, these services can be a godsend. You can live like a king, if you're the right sort of person.

But I'm not the right sort of person. I don't need to outsource anything, because I don't do anything. I don't have meetings, or places to go. I wake up, walk six steps to a computer, sit there for nine hours, eat and then fall asleep. That's my life.

However, part of me still wanted to step behind this velvet rope of opulent splendour so, after chancing upon an Indian company called GetFriday, I took the plunge. For a tenner a month, plus an hourly fee, GetFriday promised that a virtual personal assistant would carry out all manner of tasks, from organising my calendar to tracking down my lost pets. They assigned me a PA named Krupa. She excelled at social media and had an MBA in marketing. Best of all, I was 80% convinced that she actually existed.

I dutifully wrote up a list of tasks I wanted Krupa to take care of. Top of that list was "book me a haircut". But my reservations about needing a PA were so pronounced that, instead of contacting Krupa, I did something dumb. I cut my own hair. Rather than send an email, I walked into my bathroom and started hacking away at my hair with a pair of nail scissors, like a deranged person in a bad horror film. I look like a fire-damaged Worzel Gummidge.

But at least this ordeal helped to shake me out of my insecurities. Krupa was there to be utilised, so I asked her to find out where I could get a suit altered, and she did it instantly. I asked her to research potential holiday locations, and she did that too. Then I asked her to run my Twitter account for 24 hours. She posted these tweets on my behalf:

"I wish I get a chance to look at Giant George the world's tallest dog."

"Where ever I go, people are following me, says 'Twitter'."

"I wish today is Sunday, but its Friday."

"Planning to hire Virtual Assistant, will it work?"

After that, I caught the outsourcing bug a little. I joined a shopping service called Thread, where a stylist picks clothes for you each week based on your personal information. It's not flawless – my stylist recommended I buy a £355 backpack, and may have misread my information as: "Please dress me as the star of a low-budget remake of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy about the adventures of a latter-day Jeremy Clarkson" – but I did end up buying some trousers.

Then I joined Gousto, which sends you ingredients for specific meals each week. It sounded easier than planning all my dinners from scratch, but more impressive than getting pizza delivered. Gousto was blisteringly expensive, but that's apparently the price of free time.

However, I'd already delegated so much that I was starting to resent having to do anything for myself at all. Cook my own food? My time was far too precious. And that's where TaskRabbit came in.

On TaskRabbit, cleaners, handymen and organisers offer to come and carry out small jobs. However, I wanted something specific. My job request read:

"WANTED: Someone to come and cook dinner for me."

But there was a flaw in my plan. My girlfriend would be on a fast day, and Gousto meals are all for two. I added a few more words:

"WANTED: Someone to come and cook dinner for me, and then eat it with me."

Brilliant. But why stop there? I perfected my request:

"WANTED: Someone to come and cook dinner for me, and then eat it with me. And then wash up."

My girlfriend wasn't thrilled with me inviting a stranger for a quasi-romantic meal for two, but she'd been funny with me for a while. This, I suspect, is because I downloaded BroApp. It's an Australian iPhone app that allows you to maintain relationships without expending an ounce of effort, by sending out a string of automated romantic text messages on your behalf.

Some people have pinpointed BroApp as a new low in outsourcing, noting how inherently lazy, unquestionably creepy, borderline sociopathic and sort of misogynistic it is. But I didn't sign up to evaluate the morals of an anonymous app developer on the other side of the world. I signed up to make my life easier. The first text went out when my girlfriend was with friends. It simply read: "xoxo".

Now, I don't put kisses at the end of anything, as a matter of principle – it's the sort of act of extreme intimacy that I'd only really feel comfortable with after about 50 unbroken years of marriage – and my girlfriend knows this. I worried that she'd see through the ruse immediately. After all, she is smart. Luckily for me, at this point she was also drunk, so I got away with it.

She took the next text in her stride, too. It was: "Je t'aime". Her reply was a casual: "Je also t'aime". Then came the third text, which is where the problems started. The third text that BroApp thought that I would write was this:

"U better b ready for an attack from smooch monster tonight!!"

The reply came immediately. "Have you been mugged?" Before I could answer, she phoned. She never phones. My use of text-speak, combined with the term "smooch monster" and repeated use of an emoticon, had unsettled her.

The problem was that I was on the quiet coach of a train, so I couldn't answer without angering my fellow passengers. What was the next best option? Blow my cover with an explanatory text? Hardly. So I got in touch with Krupa, who composed the following message:

"Good morning! I am Krupa, Stuart's assistant, sending you an email on behalf of your friend. Stuart is enjoying his travel back to London. He is fine and has not had any trouble. Please don't worry for him. He will meet you soon. Have a great day!"

There. Perfect. Well, maybe not perfect – straight after Krupa sent it, I received another sniffy text: "Nothing puts those sorts of concerns to bed like an email from a stranger."

So things weren't great, even before TaskRabbit. My girlfriend had initially refused to come home, while my helper – whom she'd started to refer to as "the floozy" – was cooking for me. But ask yourself this: what's creepier? Cooking a meal and eating it with one strange man in his home, or cooking a meal and eating it with one strange man in his home while his girlfriend sits there awkwardly in silence watching you both? It's obviously the first one, so I coerced my girlfriend into joining me. I'm pleased I did, because she got on famously with my helper. Her name was Daphne, she was a university student who'd just completed her final-ever exam and for some reason had decided to celebrate by travelling to the arse-end of London to cook a curry for a weirdo. The food she made was delicious, she was boundlessly enthusiastic and the three of us ended up eating and drinking and chatting for hours into the evening.

Daphne was so disarmingly friendly that it was almost like inviting a friend for dinner. I say almost, because you don't usually order your friends to wash up immediately after you've finished eating, and friends don't tend to charge you £45 to – essentially – heat up a ready meal. I'd have Daphne back in a heartbeat if I could, but I'd die impoverished if I did so I won't.

Despite this success, it was becoming clear that outsourcing was out of my budget. And that meant firing Krupa. I've never fired anyone before, and I wanted to make it as painless as possible. So before I pulled the trigger, I gave her a couple of final tasks. First, I asked her to compose an honest assessment of me as a boss.

She wrote: "Stu, the day you signed up with GetFriday, I was keen to know more. I did further reading on you and found that you are fun loving, a good writer and an active user of Twitter. I got anxious about posting tweets, as you expected them to be original and funny. The trust you placed on me by asking to post for an account with a large number of followers made me nervous and happy at the same time. It was a joy to work with you."

Slightly heartbroken by Krupa's response, I issued my final task – making her buy herself a gift on my behalf. I suggested flowers, but she told me she'd prefer a book.

In total, my week of outsourcing cost me hundreds of pounds and saved me barely any time at all. My email inbox is now cluttered with correspondence from my various assistants. I'm less relaxed than ever. And, as you've probably figured out, the whole experience turned me into a legitimately horrible boyfriend.

I've learned that there's an honesty and purity in doing your own work, and it far outweighs the benefits of delegation. Stuff just works better if I do everything myself. Apart from cutting my own hair, obviously. Honestly, you should see the state of it.

Gary Shteyngart: 'I like to look at videos of long-haired dachshunds'

'Some people watch stock prices or pornography. I like to look at videos and images of long-haired dachshunds at work and play.' Photograph: Getty Images

While it has destroyed literature, the intertube is helpful for people who enjoy long-haired dachshunds. I don't write very much these days; most of what I do has been outsourced to India. My last book, a "memoir" called Little Failure, reads like the childhood of a boy in Russia but look at page 273: "It was a cold Leningrad morning. My mother had picked out her best sari and the maid was making rice and dhal." This slipped through, but mostly you couldn't tell that a guy in Bangalore wrote it. This leaves me with tons of time with nothing to do. Some people watch stock prices or pornography. I like to look at videos and images of long-haired dachshunds at work and play.

In New York, nobody can afford an entire dog so people co-op a dog. You know, a Russian oligarch owns 40% of it, I have 30% and someone else has 30%. But the oligarch never comes to New York because he's too busy destroying Ukraine.

I've outsourced the books and I've outsourced Twitter and Facebook to my dachshunds. Once, I posted a beautiful picture of Felix (my dachshund) and a woman wrote, in Russian, that all the sadness of the Jewish people was captured in his eyes. Isn't that beautiful? It sounds even better in Russian.

Felix is a kind of avatar for me; he is completely covered in fur, he is short and has incredible back problems, as do many dachshunds.

I can't write accomplished books, so Twitter, Facebook and dachshund representation is what I have. I'm 87% digital content, a content provider. Or someone in Bangalore does it under my name.

Sophie Heawood: 'I'm addicted to property websites'

'Sometimes I stay up till 3am moving to the Hollywood Hills. Or Mexico City. Or a small Hebridean farming community where I was going to live like Linda McCartney and breed goats.' Illustration: Ben Lamb for the Guardian

There are many routes to spiritual enlightenment, but spending every night in your own home peering through the windows of other people's, getting irked when there are no pictures of the side – well, it's probably not one of them. But I can't stop myself; I am addicted to property websites.

The gateway drug is Rightmove, which lists houses for sale in the UK. Then there is Dwell, Freunde von Freunden, The Selby and Take Sunset, which are a bit more lifestyle, taking you into beautiful strangers' homes around the world. Sometimes I stay up till 3am moving to the Hollywood Hills. Or Mexico City. Or a small Hebridean farming community where I was going to live like Linda McCartney and breed goats. It is a good idea to live in the moment, but I largely live in someone else's moments. In someone else's house. It has gone so far that I have set up a Twitter account, @propertyjazz, just to deposit some of the treasures I find.

Only five minutes, I tell myself, as I settle down to a search of Hampstead town houses in case one of these multimillion-pound properties has accidentally come on sale at around the £230,000 mark. I mean, you never know. Of course, the most attractive thing is seeing what you could get somewhere else for the same price. A rundown French chateau with chickens jumping into the pool for the same price as a three-bedroom flat in Walthamstow! A farmhouse in Estonia for the same price as a flight to the farmhouse in Estonia. A private island in Greece for the same price as a flat in Manhattan. You start planning how you could live in the flat in Manhattan and commute to the private island every second weekend.

As soon as a friend gives me their address, I'm on Google Street View, walking down their street, seeing where they live. (I can't believe I am writing this down.) Nor is this only an online problem: as a journalist who sometimes goes round to famous people's homes and interviews them, I often find myself trying to interview the house.

This week I went to a classical conductor's flat to interview her about orchestras and found myself on my knees in her hallway, tugging at the lino to work out if there were floorboards underneath.

She didn't seem to mind, having already politely fielded my questions about her tracker mortgage. As soon as I left I was on my Zoopla app, looking for properties for sale in the area.

While all of this is going on, my own lovely, wonky, 1970s house is in chaos, untended as I dream of elsewhere. The truth is that I am lucky to have it at all. There is a housing crisis. The whole thing is nuts. But it doesn't stop me fantasising about what I would do if I could pull down that clumpy conservatory those idiots have tacked on to my lovely Georgian drawing room. I mean theirs. Their lovely Georgian drawing room.

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